At about 6.30pm when residents were locking their business premises and some others just hanging out after closing from work, two suspected female bombers detonated improvised explosive devices, IEDs, at about three minutes interval killing scores of street traders and passersby.
The blasts took place close to the scenes of the May 20, 2014 twin blasts which killed about 118 people.
Immediately the IEDs went off, security agencies, Red Cross members and other rescue workers besieged the site evacuating victims to nearby hospitals.
The hospitals, which received the victims, included the Jos University Teaching Hospital, which had two survivors, and Plateau Specialist Hospital, which had 30 survivors on admission and 10 dead bodies.
Others are Our Lady of Apostle, OLA, which had 10 survivors and nine dead persons as well as the Bingham University Teaching Hospital.
At the Plateau Specialist Hospital, Jos, son of one of those killed, Mr. Basil Alagwe, in tears, lamented his father’s death. “So Boko Haram attacks finally reached my family? The North is not fair to me,” he stated.
He continued, “My beloved father told me ‘bye bye’ yesterday morning. I never knew it was the final bye.”
The late Alagwe, Sunday Vanguard gathered, was a father of five and dealt in motor spare parts. He had a shop at Dilimi area of Jos but resided at Rukuba Road. He had just closed from work and was on his way home when the blasts went off.
A survivor, Ado Abubakar, a 38-year old “off loader”, speaking on his hospital bed, narrated how he escaped death, “I was standing in front of the former Etisalat office that evening. I did not see anything, I just heard a loud sound from the Ahmadu Bello roundabout, close to Zenith Bank.
“Before I knew it, an object hit me on the chest and I fell. I passed out. I later woke up and found that people helped me to this hospital. I thank God I am alive. Those women selling pepper, they died just like that.”
The Permanent Secretary, Plateau State Ministry of Health, Dr. Elias Pede, while expressing grief over the incident, said the casualty figure might rise.
Meanwhile, the Plateau Peace Practitioners Network, PPPN, a coalition of NGOs/CSOs working in the areas of peace-building, human rights, good governance and development in the state, has condemned the “horrible and senseless killing of innocent people in the blasts.”
In a statement issued in Jos by the group’s President, Godwin Okoko, and Secretary, Chris Ogbonna, the blasts came at a time Plateau people were counting their modest achievement in promoting harmonious communal relationships and breaking the barriers of ethnic and religious differences.
They described the incident as a relentless effort by enemies of peace to break the people’s resolve to remain peaceful.
They sympathized with victims of the explosions and their families and applauded the efforts of well-meaning Nigerians as well as government to provide relief to those affected.
They appealed to the people to remain calm and “not give in to moves to cause violence and disrupt the peace in Jos” while urging all to remain security conscious and vigilant.
Culled from Vanguard
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